Monday, December 08, 2008

Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County

Election officials in a small county in California discovered by chance last week that the tabulation software they used to tally votes in this year's general election dropped 197 paper ballots from the totals at one precinct. The system's audit log also appears to have deleted any sign that the ballots had ever been recorded.

An investigation shows that the paper mail-in ballots were scanned properly by officials into the central-count optical-scan system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) -- a receipt printed out by the machine at the time they were scanned on November 1, three days before the election, indicates that the machine recorded the ballots.

The ballots even showed up in preliminary tallies counted on election night on November 4 and in a report printed out on November 23. But some time after this point, the tabulation software inexplicably deleted the ballots without election officials ever knowing.